Sunday, 22 April 2012

When the US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs describes the governments of Russia and China as 'despicable', then you know things are getting pretty serious. Yet that is what Hillary Clinton did in condemning them for their veto on a UN Security Council resolution over Syria in her address to the Friends of the Syrian People meeting in Tunis on February 24.

Yet had they not done so, we could now have a major conflagration throughout the Middle East.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how people in the West still believe what they're being told by politicians and the mass media even when they know they're being lied to. The Big Lie over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is now generally understood to have been just that. But all Tony Blair had to do was to move on to other fortunes and keep smiling, whilst a look-alike takes over in Downing Street. It's still the same Eton/Bullingdon Club clique. It's still the same City of London who dominate the financial markets, and, it seems, the press and the politicians, as again illustrated by the resignation of Conservative Party treasurer Peter Cruddas, who had been caught offering access to the heart of government in exchange for large donations.

It's still the same Big Lies. It's still to a large extent the same deferential public. Even though things are beginning to change, the Establishment still manages to maintain an illusion of normality.

When the press reported an attempted assassination of Vladimir Putin, many Russians were sceptical, saying that he may have made the whole story up himself. Judging by a television report on Channel 4 News, most Muscovites appeared to think that, but that doesn't seem entirely consistent with Putin's high popularity rating. It does mean, though, that at least that was what some were thinking. The Russians know they're being lied to; the English don't, and even when they do they still believe what they're being told. It's taking a long time to change that.

I think it's a dangerous game for Western reporters to play, because sooner or later Westerners will latch on to the idea that if a terrorist attack on Putin can be faked, then possibly so can a terrorist attack in London. How long will it be before people in the street will start questioning who was behind the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005? Perhaps showing the film 'ZERO: An investigation into 9/11' on television more widely throughout the world would help build up the resistance to new NATO adventures. How about it, Russia Today? Or would RT get itself banned in the UK as Iran's Press TV did?

How much do we actually know about what is going on in Syria? We are being asked to believe that the Syrian government is placing snipers on rooftops and are gratuitously shooting their own citizens and firing missiles into their own cities for no reason whatsoever. There's a war on. There are at least two sides. We don't know who is firing what. We're not being told, and quite probably the reporters don't know either. Yet we're constantly being told that Assad is behind it all. I have been constantly dismayed at the degree of one-sided reporting by the generally available free television channels in the UK, systematically ignoring the possibility that Assad's forces may have been reacting to an armed insurrection instigated from outside Syria. I was particularly disappointed with Al Jazeera. Russia Today reported on 12 March: "Qatar's aggressive stance towards Assad has led to a string of resignations at the country's al-Jazeera TV news channel. Those who left describe bias at the station which they say has become a tool to target the Syrian regime".

Russia Today carried a further report two days later ('Media - West proxy to fuel Syria conflict':

Last August, James Corbett, who produces The Corbett Report, warned that there were some very strange things going on, and that it was encumbant on the public to always be sceptical.

Historian Webster Tarpley, too, warned in August that the public should treat media reports with scepticism, saying that the destabilisation of Syria is an armed insurrection, and was largely artificial ('Tarpley on Syria: Beware of fraud and fabrications!':

More recently an interviewee talks of state-sponsored terrorism and terror management by the US in Syria ('Terror Management: US losing credibility in Syria':

US activist and journalist Don Debar says that the head of the Syrian National Council, sitting in Paris, is the head of an armed terrorist group, which could not operate in Syria with impunity without the backing of the US and the Arab League countries ('Arab states support for Syrian rebels pure terrorism':

John R Bradley is author of a recently published book 'After the Arab Spring' (http://johnrbradley.wordpress.com/4-after-the-arab-spring). He told Russia Today: "NATO is determined to bring the Assad regime to its knees as a prelude to invading Iran and also to further marginalising Russia ... Saudi Arabia is financially and politically supporting the civilian opposition, and Qatar has been widely reported to be funding and arming the jihadi rebels who are leading this insurrection" (''Saudi-funded jihad targets Syria as last secular Arab state':

In December last year the multilingual Voltaire Network carried an article by investigative journalist Thierry Meyssan, who claimed that Aldel Hakim Belhaj, historic leader of Al Qaeda in Libya, and Military Governor of Tripoli, was chief of the Free Syrian Army. He wrote: "The UN Security Council members are at loggerheads over the interpretation of the events that are rocking Syria. One the one hand, France, the United Kingdom and the United States claim that a revolution has swept the country, in the aftermath of the 'Arab Spring', and suffering a bloody crackdown. On the other hand, Russia's and China's take is that Syria is having to cope with armed gangs from abroad, which it is fighting awkwardly thereby causing collateral victims among the civilian popoulation it seeks to protect. The on-the-spot investigation undertaken by Voltaire Network validated the latter interpretation". He states that their findings reinforce the thesis which he has defended since the attacks of September 11, 2001, that Al Qaeda fighters are mercenaries of the service of the CIA

Following the massive bomb explosions in Aleppo on 10 February, the Western press was blaming the Syrian government, reports Russia Today, but then Colonel Arif Hamood of the Free Syrian Army was reported to have claimed responsibility for the two blasts that targeted military and security buildings in the city (' Dozens dead as rebel bomb wave rips Syria's second city:

Remember Operation Gladio? Most readers of this newsletter will be aware of it, but most members of the public will have no idea, even though a BBC documentary on it was broadcast on the BBC in 1992, when the BBC was more at liberty to expose such things than it is now.

It was quite clear that NATO's secret armies were behind terrorist events throughout Western Europe, as part of a 'strategy of tension' to keep the populations under control. Yet it has been wiped out of our collective memory by a mainstream media more keen to cover up than to write up. The idea that a terrorist attack could be linked to Western security services is just not thinkable in England. Anyone who even suggests that as a possibility could find himself accused of antisemitism or holocaust denial. Yet it happened. And the mass of detail contained in Nick Kollerstrom's excellently researched book 'Terror on the Tube' can lead us to no other sensible conclusion.

So if that can happen in Western Europe, what is happening in Syria today? Governments outside the anglosphere must be scarred stiff of such interventions. They will all remember the overthrow of the Mossadeq government in Iran by MI6 and the CIA, which President Obama admitted to in his famous speech in Cairo.

The Russian security services must be scared stiff of that, too. Senator John McCain told the BBC's Newsnight on 11 October last year that Putin and some of the Chinese leaders could face the same fate as Gadaffi.

How is it possible to run a democracy under such conditions? The terror threat has been consistently ramped up in order to gain popular support and stay in power. I thought the Cold War was supposed to be over.

A Japanese reader forwarded me a circular from Aavaz headed 'Arrest the torturers'. It was about Syrian torturers and the need to take military action against the Assad regime. In the whole circular there wasn't a word about the fact that the US had been sending people under extraordinary rendition to Syria for torture. Yet it was all written up in Stephen Grey's book 'Ghost Plane'. That makes those responsible in the US at least as bad as the Syrian security services. Some may call it hypocrisy, but I think that many in the inner circles of the Anglo-American Establishment would take that as a compliment. It looks to me like a pretext for war.

People in the truth movement have been talking about the anglosphere moving towards World War III for some time. Now that possibility is being talked about more widely.

"The WWIII scenario is unthinkable. This war would extend from the Mediteranean to the Chinese border. It could possibly include Russia and China", he told Russia Today, "We could find ourselves at a very critical crossroads".

The trigger for WW3 could be extremists in charge of Israel, who are talking about attacking Iran. Iran knows that if it did develop nuclear weapons and attempt to use them they would be very heavily outnumbered, and that they would be obliterated well before they had the chance to do that to anyone else. An Iranian friend told me several years ago that he was worried that the Iranian government was doing just what Saddam Hussain did in Iraq. But Iran is not Iraq, and it would be far more difficult for NATO to control such mountainous terrain. So what would be the sense in bombing it, other than as a provocation?

If Israel does bomb Iran, let's hope that Obama manages to resist the powerful Israeli lobby in the US, and at least stay out of this. Ahmadinejad's best bet would be not to retaliate; the rest of the world would then be against such aggression. Public opinion would be split in Israel itself. An Israeli Rabbi has argued that there is in any case no need to attack since, in his view, they will destroy themselves. There would be massive demonstrations in the US and the UK. Perhaps in the UK they would be ignored, as they were at the time of the attack on Iraq, or perhaps there would be a vicious clamp-down by the security services, using the Olympic Games as a pretext.

(Remember how upset the Icelanders were when the UK invoke counterterrorism legislation against them after the collapse of their bank?). The blog also links to an interview with General Wesley Clark, who reported that immediately after 9/11 the US had plans to invade seven nations: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iran. Alexander Higgin writes:

It's all supposed to be about democracy, freedom and human rights, yet such values seem to be constantly eroded in the present-day anglosphere. After I'd written the piece above saying that Russia Today might get itself banned in the UK if it were to broadcast the film ZERO, there were widespread reports that their YouTube site had been suspended. On 18 March viewers were getting a message: "This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, scams and commercially deceptive content". The service was soon restored, and the disruption was attributed to a technical problem. YouTube is owned by Google, so I looked up what Alex Jones had to say, and found an interesting compilation posted on 12 February. I also found a recent broadcast based on research by his London correspondent headed 'Steve Watson: Google launches Cover-up of Google Spies Story' in which he states that Google is basically an NSA front.

"This isn't the government taking over corporations; this is the government merging with corporations", Alex Jones said. As I was researching that I found a further Infowars article by Steve Watson, which appeared on 16 March, under the heading 'CIA Head: We Will Spy On Americans Through Electrical Appliances'. On 12 December 2010 Angela Levin wrote in the Daily Mail,

Now imagine if they did that for political purposes. I've been assuming since 2005 that my emails could be being trawled by GHCQ and automatically redirected to relevant people, some of whom seemed to know too much.

In January's newsletter I wrote about the investigation by Mark Windows into the Bank of Ideas, a group which appears to have taken over the now disbanded Occupy camp outside St Paul's Cathedral in central London. Further research has revealed a link with the organisation Common Purpose. Mark wrote to me: "The Occupy movement quickly spread around the world. At St. Pauls in London 'facilitators' were brought in to lead the Consensus meetings. The meetings are referred to as General Assemblies. The facilitators appeared soon after St Pauls Occupy started. The main facilitator at St. Pauls was Saskia Kent. Saskia with the help of a new group of leaders set about splitting the camp into groups. The agenda changed from exposing and changing the financial system into promoting climate change and the principles of [the UN action plan] Agenda 21. Many of the most influential voices were shut down and many started leaving. The attendance at General Assemblies slowly dwindled. One of the techniques used is The 'Human Mic' where the crowd repeat robotically what the facilitator says. Meaningless and bland statements, such as 'Humanity towards irreversible climate change', are repeated by the crowd. Saskia attended a Common Purpose Matrix Course and also is involved with government programs like the Global Entrepreneurial awards and promoting climate change in schools. … The control of the Occupy groups may include Delphi technique, the use of 'dragons' in the crowd to shut down protest or dissent and of co-facilitators who filter what questions are brought up at meetings. This technique once discovered is fairly simple to counter." This is demonstrated in his latest video,'The Puppet Master of Occupy'.

I, too, found a link with Common Purpose in my Esperanto work. The Wedgwood Memorial College in Barlaston, Staffordshire, comes under the control of the local authorities in the City of Stoke-on-Trent. It was paying its way when the authorities started 'messing up', with the inevitable result that they can now claim that it is not paying its way, and should be closed down. In order to 'save' the college a group has been sending out anonymous emails asking for pledges for donations should their scheme, which has already been rejected, go ahead to take over the running of the college. I understand that the co-ordinator of that group, and possibly the sole member, is the College's former Principal, Dr Derek Tatton. I now find in the Common Purpose Exposed website that Derek Tatton took the Common Purpose Matrix course in 1996.

No-one is suggesting that all those who took a Common Purpose course would necessarily have subsequently taken part in the network, but why should a local authority pay nearly £4 000 to send an employee on a leadership course, "making connections", when he had already been in the same job for 16 years and would continue for another six or seven years until his retirement. What would it have been preparing him for? Some time after that he learned Esperanto, and said to me "Nun mi estas Esperantisto". Shortly afterwards he joined the Esperanto management committee where he became the key player in relocating the association's headquarters to the college under a ludicrous contract that no-one seemed to understand and no-one had voted for. Then he was a keen player in disputes with the new Principal, and then, when she resigned, in keeping members ignorant of an attempt to save the college from closure in 2007. A friend of mine who was at the college in January this year told me there was an air of normality, and that you wouldn't think the place was going to be boarded up on 1 April. It's an illusion of normality. I do think the people of Stoke-on-Trent need to wake up to such things; someone needs to check out the other names on the Common Purpose Database.

I would have been amazed to have heard of such things fifty years ago when I learned Esperanto; the first of March was my anniversary. It actually took two months to become reasonably fluent, but on the first of March I completed Chapter 5 of my textbook, which informed me that I now had all the basics. Ten years ago I celebrated by taking wine and nibbles to the London Esperanto Club. Twenty years ago the sharp decline in membership of the national association began, brought about through 'messing up'. Forty years ago I was starting to notice a few things, and started researching in the library. I was amazed to find that similar things had been happening twenty years before that, yet no-one had said a thing about it to me. If they had just kept talking, I would have made the link much earlier, and would have raised the issue much earlier with the president of the Universal Esperanto Association, who was being targeted at the time just as he had been in the 1950s. When I did raise it with him it was too late. I had suspicions that both frenzies could have been coming from Washington, whereas he was about to publish a scathing attack on Moscow, who he believed to be trying to take the association over, in collusion with the Communist Party of Great Britain. If people had kept talking, we could well have come to the idea that the whole furore had been coming from London all the time and that I, too, was right at the centre of it, as it now seems. The whole course of history in the movement could well have been changed.

But there's been a positive and very interesting development, too. Google has at last included Esperanto in its list of languages covered in its automatic translation system. The reason this is particularly interesting is that the quality of translation from Esperanto is far higher than that obtained from other languages. That was the theory some of us were working on in the 1980s with a commercial research project in which Esperanto was used as the pivot language. Once a text could be converted to Esperanto, the rest was easy. Now we know that that principle works. One implication of that is that if you want to make a website really multilingual, then produce it in Esperanto, and put a 'Google translate' button on the page. At the same time, when I was reading David Icke's article on Common Purpse on Jeff Rense's website I noticed an advertising banner at the top, worded: 'HALTU – Nova Monda Ordo'. Brilliant! I hadn't noticed at first that it was in Esperanto. It took me to an Esperanto radio ham site written in ham Esperanto. Sooner or later we'll have truly multilingual truth sites springing up based on Esperanto. Unless, of course, Common Purpose or some other network manage to intervene and mess that one up, too!

If Hillary Clinton does lose the information war then when the 9/11 wars are over, and eventually military might is restricted to just what is needed for defence rather than for empire-building, and we get the freedom of speech that we used to think we had, and they stop dumbing down the learning of foreign languages other than English, what language will we be speaking as our main second language? Will it be English? Or Russian? Or Chinese? Or Arabic? Or will it be Esperanto? The Economist has posed a 'Big Question' on which language people think is most worth learning.

But first, we have to win the information war. The military situation is critical and could go either way; its a situation in which individuals can indeed make a difference in tipping the balance of power. Whatever language you do it in, do keep talking.

The Maiwand Lion

This statue, made of cast iron and weighing 16 tons, is situated in the town of Reading, Berkshire. The inscription reads:

This monument records the names and commemorates the valour and devotion of XI (11) officers and CCCXVIII (318) non-commissioned officers and men of the LXVI (66th) Berkshire Regiment who gave their lives for their country at Girishk Maiwand and Kandahar and during the Afghan Campaign MDCCCLXXIX (1879) - MDCCCLXXX (1880).

"History does not afford any grander or finer instance of gallantry and devotion to Queen and country than that displayed by the LXVI Regiment at the Battle of Maiwand on the XXVII (27th) July MDCCCLXXX (1880)."

Despatch of General Primrose.

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This blog has been set up to publish regular newsletters in conjunction with the Berkshire 9/11 Truth website. The newsletters are on current issues as well as offering opinions on media articles both in the UK and abroad.